In the scroll mouse now being commonly used, there is a wheel located between the left and the right keys to enable users to directly skip pages or text lines through rotation of the wheel when reading lengthy texts (such as novels or presentation data) without depressing the page down key on the keyboard or moving the mouse and cursor to the scroll bar on the right side of the screen and depress the left key to execute page down or line skip operation. Namely, the wheel can replace the scroll bar function on the right side of the screen to make user operation easier.
Refer to FIG. 1 for an improved mouse design proposed by Applicant. It provides an improved scroll bar function on the screen that not only has a longitudinal up and down movement on the right side, also has a scroll bar design on the lower side of the screen to provide leftward and rightward transverse movements. It is applicable to table listing software such as EXCEL or ACCESS or Web pages. However, for lengthy table fields, scroll bar operation and control cannot fully meet requirements. The general keyboard also does not have corresponding keys to provide transverse movement function. Users have to move the mouse to the scroll bar and depress the left key to operate. Such a design does not fully exploit the advantages of the wheel. Therefore the present invention aims to provide a design that directly uses the wheel of the mouse, and the left and right keys, and left and right direction keys to output switch ON/OFF signals to move the mouse cursor to a desired location for execution or viewing without moving the mouse
FIG. 2 shows another conventional design disclosed by Microsoft Co. It is a mouse equipped with a tilt wheel. The product includes a sway seat to couple with a wheel. The sway seat may be moved with the wheel to the left and right side to touch button switches located on two sides of the sway seat to output corresponding instructions. Adding the sway seat makes design and fabrication more complicated. And the size of the mouse cannot be shrunk because of addition of the sway seat and the button switches. It is suitable only for large mouse products.
Based on the two cited references mentioned above, it is clear that the industry at present still mainly focuses on the button switches to generate output signals. The button switch is more expensive. Moreover, with the prevailing product trend that requests lean and light, adding the button switch is against this trend in terms of the mouse size. Hence at present only the medium and large mouses adopt such a design. It also cannot be adapted to the keyboard or remote control device that also has a wheel. Because the location to accommodate the wheel is even more constrained on the keyboard and remote control device. Therefore to develop a small size, low cost and easy to fabricate wheel and instruction switch is one of the main design focuses in the industry.
There are other examples such as U.S. Pat. No. 6,700,564 which achieves picture scrolling function on the screen through pressure sensing. U.S. Pat. No. 6,188,389 adopts a grating switch to detect rotation of the wheel to scroll the picture. Those two references still employ the conventional design by using photoelectric switches. The cost is higher and the required space is larger. Thus they also do not coincide with the current trend that demands lean and light.